TracingSummit2008

Contents

Overview

New electronic services rely on an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure composed of powerful servers, numerous fixed or mobile clients, and the system and networking software. The central processing units have evolved from simple processors, to symmetric multi-processors (SMP), non-uniform memory access (NUMA) SMPs and more recently multi-core (SMP on a single chip) systems. Embedded soft and hard real-time multi-core multi-computer systems are exceedingly difficult to debug and tune. Many problems, often timing related, only show under real loads, when the hardware (cache, page tables, synchronization) and software (operating system, virtual machines, libraries and applications) are interacting in real-time. The development time of distributed, online, applications is a major stumbling block for creating new services. Tools are needed to extract precise, globally ordered, debugging and performance data while minimizing the overhead on the systems under test. This data must be made available to suitable monitoring, visualization and analysis frameworks.

Objective

Experts from industry and university present the state of the art in the area of tracing/monitoring of computer systems, (including distributed and multi-core systems) and have advanced users present challenging problems they are facing. This should better adapt the R&D efforts in the area of diagnostic (security, reliability, accuracy, debugging, optimization, resource utilisation, timing behaviour) to the real priorities of industrial and governmental practitioners.

Organization

This event is held jointly by Ericsson, Defence R&D Canada and l'École Polytechnique de Montréal in preparation of a DND/NSERC R&D partnership project and the creation of an Eclipse tracing framework.

The representatives from each organization are:

Michel Dagenais has been active in the area of system analysis tools for the past 15 years. The Linux Trace Toolkit, developed under his supervision at Ecole Polytechnique, is used throughout the world and gained the cooperation of a large number of industrial contributors over the years from Autodesk Media and Entertainment, Ericsson, Google, IBM, Monte Vista, Sony and others. Phone: +1 514 340 4711 x4029, e-mail: michel.dagenais@polymtl.ca

Dominique Toupin has been working at Ericsson on software engineering improvements with the open source community, researchers and commercial companies. He developed systems to manage wireless networks.

Robert Charpentier after working at CAE Electronics on flight simulators, joined Canada Defense Research at Valcartier where he specialized in infrared imagery and space-based surveillance. His current research interests are in secure interoperability and software robustness.